Version 2.7 is out – a few days ahead of schedule

Good news! I’ve just released another update – a few days ahead of schedule even! In a few hours you’ll be able to get your hands on version 2.7, but until then you’ll have to do with a few notes and a change log.

Version 2.7 has been about making some fundamental changes to the underlying structure of the application. I’ve made it significantly better in terms of expandability, and it’s much easier adding support for new file sources going forward.

This update also includes a number of improvements in terms of Trakt integration. The Trakt sync functionality has been completely re-written and it’s much smarter now. This also means that it’ll stop messing with your Trakt libraries and history (sorry about that one). Did I mention that it’s significantly faster as well?

Switching between movies, TV shows and web content is significantly faster now

Added option to mark an entire TV show season as watched

Various performance improvements

Various bug fixes

Added a setting to always delete files when removing content

Added support for more file naming conventions

Subtitles now get deleted along with video files

If you want an almost complete overview of the changes (bug fixes and performance improvements in particular), I highly recommend you check out the closed Github issues. Almost all the changes are listed there.

Next versions

I’m planning on doing a major re-work of TV shows, setting up file sources, adding support for UPnP and fixing the widgets. The most interesting here is undoubtedly the TV show re-work. I plan on pretty much dumping everything I’ve got right now and make it all over again. The code is horrible at the moment and there’s a lot of room for improvement. The planned re-work is also the reason why it’s currently not possible to download an entire season for offline watching – you’ll have to do it manually one by one for now. Luckily, it’s capable of queueing the downloads.

The file sources stuff will basically be an attempt to improve the usability of adding new file sources in the application. It’s not exactly user friendly at the moment. I’d also like to make it possible to add multiple file source folders at once, and possibly even individual file source folder options, as the restructured library update code will be much better at handling stuff like that.

UPnP support is something that’s been a long time coming. I had to make some structural changes first, and although I’m not quite finished with that, I’m pretty confident that UPnP support will be in the next version. I’ve got it working in a separate test application and just need to implement it in Mizuu.

The widget stuff might be postponed a bit as it depends on external factors, but it’s coming within a few months.

Open sourcing

I’ve been wanting to open source Mizuu for educational purposes for quite some time and I’m seriously thinking of doing it with the upcoming 3.0 release in May or June. The purpose of going open source is purely educational. I want to help other people learn Android development and I want to get better myself by letting other people look at my work and potentially help me improve it.

Mizuu will remain a paid application on Google Play and the source code will be published under some sort of open source license – probably Apache Version 2.0. If anyone has any advice on going open source, I’d love to hear it as it’ll be my first “real” attempt – and quite honestly it is a bit scary.

And finally…

The update will be available within a few hours. You know where to find it…

Patches

25 Comments

Just wanted to let you know that scrolling performance is perfect with this update. It fixed the stuttering problem I was experiencing on the last build. Nexus 5 and Nexus 7 2013 work as good as I could hope. Looking forward to the future releases!

I have one problem that has been recurring since I first started using Mizuu. For some reason it won’t identify the TV show Wilfred (US) separately from Wilfred (AU). Even when I manually identify the files, they just don’t show up. Not a big deal, but I thought I’d mention it.

These are the naming conventions used for XBMC, but Mizuu is lumping both series into just the Australian series. I also noticed a bug that I think was introduced with the latest version. When you try to manually identify a file, it will automatically prompt you to download for offline viewing. This is from a Samba share.

Hi, I would just like to echo the issue that Hunter talked about, where when we try to manually identify a file, it will ask for offline viewing confirmation. Other than that, trakt syncing is hyper fast now!!! Really awesome, looking forward to the tv shows overhaul!!

Great performance scrolling images! Congratulations! i have problems identifying seasons in TV shows with numbers in its names. In “30 Rock” all seasons are number 30, and in “24”, all of them are number 24. Is it a bug?

I just remembered a long standing bug I have forgotten to report. If you long press on a TV episode, the contextual action bar will pop up briefly before taking you to the details view of the episode. When you back out to the list view, the contextual action bar is still activated.

Edit: If you’re using a device with a very poor screen resolution, that might be it. I’ll upload a version which fixes it, but I really wouldn’t recommend using Mizuu on such a device. It’s far from the “target device” so to speak.

Replying to your other comment here, as the threading will make it hard to read if I reply directly to your other comment…

Anyway, there’s not much I can do for you. There’s something wrong with the Android OS on your device. I’m guessing it’s a cheap Chinese device of some kind and that it’s running a super low resolution. There are no other crashes of this exact kind, which leads me to believe that it’s an isolated case and that it’s due to a buggy Android customization.

There’s not a whole lot you can do other than trying to change the buffer size in Mizuu’s advanced settings. It’s been optimized just about as much as possible, though – I’m getting far better speeds with Mizuu’s streaming implementation than any other I’ve tried.